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Friday, February 14, 2014

Sterile Does Not Equal Peaceful

You know how, in bad science fiction movies, everyone seems to be wearing plastic and tinfoil uniform jumpsuits? Maybe that was a more apt metaphor for the direction of our world than it seemed at the time (or that the filmmakers intended, consciously). I say "metaphor" because rather than a prediction that people would actually dress like that, maybe the art designers were subconsciously reflecting the direction in which they felt the world moving in terms of its mood.

Cold. Metal. Plastic.

Ray Bradbury, in an interview many years ago, said he was out to "prevent the future." Near the end of his life, when asked about that, he said, "they didn't listen to me."

It feels to me like we are distilling everything; attempting to move toward a perfection of social interaction that we can never achieve and that we are attempting this by sterilizing every dynamic of human intercourse.

I am empathetic to the idea of trying to create Utopia. Really. But, if Utopia means the total absence of varied viewpoints; of natural sexual dynamics; or, if it means that the average (groupthink-oriented) mind is going to continue to try to "interpret" the statements of others and find within those interpretations evil thoughts, I don't want to live in it.

We really have not listened to any of the sci-fi writers the way we should have.